Ties of Visegrád countries with East Asia – trade and investment

As a consequence of the European recession, interest of Central European firms has increased towards Asian markets. Trade and investment relations seem to have intensified between the four Visegrád countries and East Asia. This paper aims to analyse trends of foreign direct investment and the development, geographical and commodity structure of the mutual trade. Our paper also briefly outlines the economic policy of the given countries for the further development of Visegrád-Asian relations. The applied method is the statistical analysis of Eurostat and National Bank data as well as Chinese statistics. Our main findings are the following: first, trade between the Visegrád region and East Asia is largely influenced by multinational companies in global value chains; second, these networks have interlinked the two regions increasingly strongly in the past years; third, the pattern and intensity of connection to multinational networks vary among Visegrád countries. Based on these findings we propose an economic policy that – apart from the support of local small firms – considers the efficient participation in global value chains.